For some time we've been running a limited test of the Ideas Forum on our Zendesk Help Desk integration. Today, we're expanding this test to our Beta Testers.

This forum allows for a great deal of flexibility in how we approach suggestions.

We can mark items that are planned, completed, or not planned at this time. We can also highlight staff responses on forums, giving more weight to responses that are important in informing deviants why we can, or cannot, take a suggestion into consideration at this time.

Deviants can vote on one anothers' posts, giving greater community control over what content is reviewed. The more votes, the higher the suggestion will appear in the forum! Unlike our current forum, threads don't expire, and when creating a new thread you'll be prompted with similar threads.

These are only a few of the features the new forum has, but altogether our testing has shown thus far that it's good at cutting down duplicate threads, encouraging new discussion and brainstorming on ideas that have already been shared.

For some time we've been running a limited test of the Ideas Forum on our Zendesk Help Desk integration. Today, we're expanding this test to our Beta Testers. This offers a great deal of flexibility on suggestions and how staff respond to suggestions, greatly improving the efficiency of the idea-sharing process and giving us better tools to identify what matters most to the deviantART community.

Please be more professional featuring people's art for selling it. In my case, I never saw any of my artworks featured by DA. That gives me the feeling that it's that way because I'm not a bootlicker and have critized unfair contests, new features, ideas etc. more than once.

Please take off the comment option of comments on our profiles, or at least let us choose if we want to have it or not. At the time we can only hide comments and everyone can read that the comments were hidden.

Please add more payment options. Like for example SafetyPay [link] and Western Union. PayPal is a major problem in my country, and this is not the first time that I mention this to DA. I would have to open a bank account in USA, what I can’t do by myself from where I live. I would have to this with & through Payoneer (I tried this several months ago and never got any card; the same happened to other people I know). PayPal and Payoneer charge me for any banking movement and for the account itself; that’s not good business for me.

This is exactly what I hoped for, some feedback from dA about the suggestion, so we could see if they are being considered. But right now I just see a lot of suggestion there, with just 3 or 4 having the "Done" or "Planned" status. For this idea to work, dA staff should check the suggestions regularly and mark them. I would even suggest a fourth status, besides planned, not planned and completed - "Considered". It means the staff saw the idea, but is not decided about it yet, and the suggestion is open for discussion. Otherwise, it just feels like speaking into the wind.

We're considering adding a "considered" status. It's important to remember that this is new, so despite a lot of ideas coming in we haven't had a lot of time to discuss them all! But we're definitely looking through them, and discussing quite a few internally.

Seriously I'm at the point I dont even want to look at deviations anymore. More like this just ruins looking at art anymore. And the vile submit page just makes it less and less desirable to upload anything.

Zendesk is a third party service we utilize. While it will populate from your deviantART avatar, it also makes use of the "gravatar" service. If you have previously set your avatar there, it may have populated from there. We are currently working on ensuring that Zendesk avatars match those on deviantART, but at the moment it is populating using that service.

Do you have a livejournal?Livejournal uses that function for your account avatarI made a livejornal for the A_B (artist beware)and it had me set up two avatars, one being through the service gravatar :/

I'll have to look at this, soon. Though, I am wary that the trolls will still reduce valid suggestions to absurdity with invalid, selfish bantering. There really ought to be a +/- or helpful/unhelpful marker for posts and replies here to help control the amount of ridiculous and irrelevant argument posting that has been going on in suggestion threads.

There are people who do nothing but spend all day hawking and posting on these forums with no meaningful contribution to the site, just to pose as illegitimate moderator wannabes. They should not continue to go unabated.

I wouldn't worry too much about those people; no one of value would pay attention to messages devoid of content.

Nevertheless, the drama is one of those things to which there's no known cure. Any approach would be either too intrusive/abused (e.g. creating accounts to up-vote yourself and/or down-vote your nemesis), or not effective enough to have a result.

Make it so that the person posting has no access to their own up/downvote link. Additionally, the right to an opinion is observed, while allowing it to be judged by everyone. Some of these folks spew opinion like it is fact, but won't be able to keep doing so if it is irrelevant and not agreed with by the general population. It also allows more people to weigh in on specific factors introduced by others in relevant conversation and shows the importance as weighed on by the community of particular pros and cons of the idea.

I agree that the drama thing is in inherent and unavoidable issue. Human nature, actually... however, that said, anything--and I mean absolutely no exceptions to this--can and will be abused by someone. The topic of abuse in general is one that I think should be handled separately, and on a more all-encompassing tone. Your argument can be extended to the more generalized topic rating system already in place in this new suggestion page, really. But that is not going to stop its implementation. I would argue that the pros of such a system in this situation outweigh the cons of occasional abuse. And if the abuse becomes a problem, let us blame the community and the moderators that watch over the site, not the ideas in particular.

Make it so that the person posting has no access to their own up/downvote link.

Only that such a thing is impossible to achieve; one could create new accounts and use different IP addresses to bypass verification. Faves and pageviews have suffered from such things for years and have lost their importance.

Again, abusers will abuse, no matter what feature or site we are talking about. This isn't a problem with the suggestion here, but a larger problem that needs to he addressed in general. If you are concerned with abuse, report it when you are capable.

We cannot allow the misbehavior of a relative few stop the development and progress of the site and community as a whole. If something implemented creates enough of a problem that it impedes the functionality of the site, the Admins will deal with it. We must trust them to do this. This responsibility is not our concern as end-users.

I wouldn't say entirely impossible. Yet, be that the case, there is no point in using it as an argument opposing any feedback or input regarding a site improvement, now is there? If it cannot be controlled, we all might as well accept it as part of the design and proceed.

Without the ugly in the world, there would be no concept of beauty. Even then, each concept is relative. Some extent of inherent imperfection must be present whether we like it or not, or it will form on its own--and may be even more undesirable. I'm not sure if there is a name for this phenomenon, but with a little observation, it'll be clear to anyone that it's a universal law.

Long story short; if abusers will abuse, and it can't be helped, is it worth fool-proofing anything when a better fool is always waiting to test it out?

I'm interested in this suggestions idea. If it helps let deviants give their ideas & dA shows they're listening, I think more people are likely to stay/join. It's when everything's mum that people are in the dark & don't stick around for long.

I think it works great, I like most of it except this part "The more votes, the higher the suggestion will appear in the forum!", I think that's a bit unfair and quite boring, I think it would be better to newest by default or at least, as the current forum, that the one that got the latest reply shows at the top.

I think it's more beneficial for newcomers to have the popular sorting by default. I'm not against a persistent filter setting, though (as in, if you switch it, the new filter becomes the default for you).

Can you explain why you think it would be beneficial for newcomers? not sure if I see your point to be honest.

I guess a persistent setting would be nice if they want to leave it at popular but to explain a bit more of why I would like newest instead of popular is because I think then it kind of would create a vicious circle in which the same suggestions are always going to be at the top because it's the most notorious spot so newcomers keep seeing it first and voting it up and it would be more and more difficult over time for new suggestions to be noticed as much, pretty much like dA's "popular-all time" setting, it does make sense to have it that way for art but for a forum where we are supposed to be discussing ideas I really don't think it makes sense.

'old'? The entire forum is bright and shiny new The top one is just around a month old, and only came to the top recently (the earlier top one is now like, 4th or so) and the top ones have been very flexible, I've seen different threads rise to the top and others be left behind already over the past days as more people got access

I was thinking that it would prevent them from submitting similar suggestions; people are more likely to suggest something common (more of a general concern - they wouldn't have otherwise gained even the original traction), as opposed to something new, so I think the current setup has a bigger effect in that respect.

I agree with your concern, but, if you think about it, a similar slippery slope could easily apply to any default filter: for instance, new suggestions would push back older ones; or dramatic episodes could fill up the first page if you sorted by updates.